Available:*
Library | Item Barcode | Shelf Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Lockport Public Library | 34094004429570 | 635.9 SILVER | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Ransomville Free Library | 34131000696933 | 635.9 SILVER | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
"For those of you--and your numbers are growing--gardening in drought-stricken parts of the country, The Bold Dry Garden will quench your thirst for inspiration." -- New York Times Book Review
Ruth Bancroft is a dry gardening pioneer. Her lifelong love of plants led to the creation of one of the most acclaimed public gardens, The Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek, California. The Bold Dry Garden offers unparalleled access to the garden and the extraordinary woman responsible for it. In its stunningly photographed pages, you'll discover the history of the garden and the design principles and plant palette that make it unique. Packed with growing and maintenance tips, profiles of signature plants for a dry garden, and innovative design techniques, The Bold Dry Garden has everything you need to create a garden that is lush, waterwise, and welcoming.
Author Notes
Johanna is a James Beard Award-winning author who writes mostly about plants and people. Johanna is a contributing editor at Better Homes & Gardens , and her work has been featured in Martha Stewart Living , The San Francisco Chronicle , and Eating Well . Previously, Johanna spent ten years at Sunset Magazine , beginning with a shovel in her hands and culminating as head of the garden department. In 2016, she oversaw the creation of new editorial test gardens as part of the brand's historic move from Menlo Park to Oakland and Sonoma.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Combining biography of the dry garden's pioneer with a landscaper's guide, Silver, a garden editor for Sunset magazine, and photographer Brenner tour the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek, Calif., and discuss the life and work of its creator and namesake. Bancroft, a centenarian, is considered a pioneer of the dry garden in both horticulture and design. The book highlights how this peculiar type of garden can thrive in the desert's extreme conditions with very little water. The standard image summoned for a desert garden is the cactus, and there are plenty in this book, along with various combinations of cultivars of the agave, bromeliads, sedums, wildflowers, irises, palm, and eucalyptus trees (naming a few). In conjunction with Bancroft's time-tested expertise, the disparate parts of a desolate landscape become a unified whole, exploding with color and texture. The key to transforming dry ground into a thriving garden involves making good use of the land itself, especially rocks, which lend ballast and form and offer optimal growing conditions for stonecrop favorites such as the sempervivum. Replete with brilliant color photography, this hopeful book will win over anyone who doubts that a desolate landscape can support thriving life. Color photos. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
years ago, I chanced upon a charming film by the designers Ray and Charles Eames. "Powers of Ten," released in 1977, is a journey in visualizing scale, beginning with a man napping by the edge of the lake in Chicago, then zooming into the vast, mysterious beyond before it snaps back down to the level of an atom. A simple idea, it's obvious - and revelatory. I think about that film when I'm mired in frustrating minutiae. I gardened this summer in a gloomy mood: the breaking of heat records, the breaking of campaign records, and a persistent drought that ruined my tiny patch of the land. The supposedly heat-tolerant salvia didn't like being slathered with blankets of humidity. Swallowtail caterpillars devoured the dill and fennel. But who am I to deny our pollinators, when they're in such trouble? It's time to put tiny demons and devilish details into perspective, to zoom out and gaze in wonder at the original garden - time to celebrate the great outdoors. Luckily, this year the centennial of the National Park Service has been the occasion of exhibits, documentaries, presidential proclamations and many books. The most glorious of these is TREASURED LANDS: A Photographic Odyssey Through America's National Parks (Cameron & Company, $65), by QT Luong. As Dayton Duncan points out in his foreword, photography has always been part of our national parks' story. In the middle of the Civil War, after pictures of Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias were displayed on the East Coast, President Lincoln signed a bill to permanently protect them. By 1916, the very first book of photographs of a dozen parks was published, and its popularity aided the creation of the National Park Service. In the late 1930s, Ansel Adams was hired to tour the parks with his camera. When asked why the government would waste money on this with World War II raging, Adams had a simple answer: His photographs were an "emotional presentation of what we are fighting for." Luong's pictures show us what we are still fighting for today, at least politically. Over the course of more than 20 years, he has visited all 59 parks, in hiking boots and snowshoes, canoes and wet suits. Though this volume is hefty, I wish it had been printed at twice the size. No government agency set Luong's agenda or paid his way. He faced hardship, waiting for those elusive moments of perfect light: sleeping outside overnight in order to catch a sunrise, confronting a brown bear, getting caught in flash floods. All worth it. No one has captured the vast beauty of America's landscape as comprehensively. The book is organized by geographical area - the Colorado Plateau, the Eastern Hardwoods, the Tropics - and features useful maps. In his extensive captions, Luong comes through as a generous, thoughtful guide, as interested in detail as in panorama - so interested that he pauses at one point to describe the unusual aspect of aspen leaves, which contain chlorophyll on both sides, so they always present "a working surface" to the sun as they sway in the wind. For photography buffs, picturing America's national PARKS (George Eastman Museum/Aperture, $50), by Jamie M. Allen, associate curator at the George Eastman Museum, is a delightful smorgasbord. Although the book includes familiar works by Ansel Adams, I was especially taken with the selections from Lee Friedlander's "America by Car" series; Roger Minick's tourists in Wyoming in 1980; Abelardo Morell's weird camera obscura tent image; Len Jenshel's otherworldly hues at Joshua Tree; and Victoria Sambunaris's serene but powerful Texas canyon imagery. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC GREATEST LANDSCAPES: Stunning Photographs That Inspire and Astonish (National Geographic, $40) lives up to its billing by taking us around the world, through four seasons, in the company of masterly photographers. Here you'll find the gnarled trunks of ancient bristlecone pines in California; smears of gold as lavender and wheat dance in the Provençal wind; eerie spikes of rock formations in Kunming, China; and otherworldly parasol mushrooms sprouting under cork oak trees in Spain. All will inspire you to fill your travel bucket-list to overflowing - or be content that someone else has already brought you so much of the world's beauty. That new specimen tulip poplar you're coddling may be lovely, but in NATURE'S TEMPLES: The Complex World of OldGrowth Forests (Timber Press, $27.95), Joan Maloof eloquently urges us to cherish the wildness of what little old-growth woodlands we have left. "Perhaps forests must be managed to get the healthiest economic return," she writes, "but true biological health is found in the unmanaged oldgrowth forests." Not only are they home to the richest diversity of creatures, but they work hard for humans too. Every tree removes an average of 4.3 pounds of air pollutants a year, while it produces oxygen. And old trees sequester more carbon - acting as carbon "sinks" while our trucks and power plants are "sources" of carbon - with ancient redwood forests capable of storing "three times more carbon aboveground than any other forests on earth." And, of course, old trees are beautiful. The forests on our planet are being crowded out, a tragic mistake. Simply saving old forests would be among the most efficient ways to save ourselves. In his foreword to the photographer Matthew Maran's HAMPSTEAD HEATH: London's Countryside (Hemisphere, $45), David Bentley, a representative of the City of London Corporation, makes the case for intense management of the park's grasslands, hedgerows, wetlands and woodlands. That's the only way to keep the Heath from going to wrack and ruin - and to keep it looking "just as it is now," as though nothing had been done. The Heath covers about 800 acres (by comparison, New York's Central Park has 843). In medieval times, some of it was used as a commons for grazing and gathering firewood, but in the late 18th century it had become a popular retreat for Londoners. Maran devotedly tromps its forests and meadows in all seasons. I defy you not to smile when you spot his photo of a Mandarin duck, a species that escaped from captivity to form a feral population in the park's ponds. Elsewhere a battle between a kestrel and a crow is graphically silhouetted, a moment of wildness to contrast with the Mandarin's kempt beauty. As the poets W. B. Yeats and Delmore Schwartz both knew, in dreams begin responsibilities. Perhaps no one dreamed bigger, at least about English beauties, than Lancelot Brown, also known as Capability - as in, your grounds have the capability of improvement. Born 300 years ago, he would happily take responsibility for creating an English style of landscape gardening that has influenced generations of designers; we can see his approach reflected in Manhattan's Central Park and Brooklyn's Prospect Park. He called himself a "place-maker." In an impressive and gorgeous volume, capability brown: Designing the English Landscape (Rizzoli, $65), the renowned garden historian John Phibbs argues that Brown created a great art form that, "at its best, was consciously intended to go unnoticed." It's no surprise, then, that he became known as "the Shakespeare of Gardening." Brown was an earth-mover, shaping the grounds of parks and estates, relocating hills, digging out valleys, damming streams, planting copses, building bridges and sprinkling grottos, rotundas, arches and or naments throughout - all to create a more relaxed, naturalistic-looking landscape. He sought a perfected nature, perhaps framed by wildness, but replete with harmony and grace. His landscapes are like "classically conceived paintings." Among the handsome photographs by Joe Cornish are views of Brown's most famous projects, including Stowe, Chatsworth and Blenheim Palace. While we're hovering over grand landscapes, those in Steven Desmond's gardens of the Italian lakes (Frances Lincoln, $50) are irresistible - even though they're exactly the sort Capability Brown was resisting. We needn't. These gardens are as richly worked as embroidered tapestries, festooned with formal terraces, hedges, pools and all manner of statuary. Feast on Marianne Majerus's photographs of Isola Bella on Lake Maggiore, begun in 1630, with its layer cake of terraces, frothily decorated with obelisks. Or the Villa San Remigio, testament to a long love affair between first cousins, with its marvelous Garden of Sadness, which had no flowers and no view, just a quiet reflecting pool. In LUCIANO GIUBBILEI: The Art of Making Gardens (Merrell, $70), the noted Italian landscape designer presents an ode to Great Dixter, Christopher Lloyd's fabled East Sussex garden. Giubbilei asked Fergus Garrett, who became head gardener in 1993 and has been in charge of Dixter since Lloyd's death in 2006, if he could visit for a while, working in the garden and hothouses, at a time when he felt a profound need for change. What follows, besides a coup de foudre for Dixter, is a loose meditation on the importance of craft, the appeal - and challenge - of simplicity and the beauty of "color that isn't really color." As you wander through Andrew Montgomery's lush photographs of Dixter, as well as those of other projects Giubbilei has designed, you'll find yourself agreeing with his credo: "Gardening . . . is a way to express deep feelings." For those of you - and your numbers are growing - gardening in drought-stricken parts of the country, Johanna Silver's THE BOLD DRY GARDEN: Lessons From the Ruth Bancroft Garden (Timber Press, $34.95) will quench your thirst for inspiration. This dazzling three-and-a-half-acre succulent garden in Walnut Creek, Calif., was the Garden Conservancy's first preservation project. Marion Brenner's elegant photographs ably capture the architectural drama of its bold forms and eccentric groupings, as well as the strange and intriguing textures of individual agaves, cycads, euphorbias and sedums. Plump or spiny, tiny or looming, succulents have enormous variety and endless appeal. It seems almost criminal to avoid them in favor of lawns. Given the water restrictions in many Southwestern cities, we are seeing a new generation of dry designers. Bancroft, who is 107 years old, first planted her garden when she was 63; her children "attribute her longevity to drinking two glasses of milk and one of sherry each day." Care of the gardener matters too. We can't hold Capability Brown entirely responsible for our fixation with lawns, but he certainly rolled out acres of thirsty, finicky green velvet. Even in his day, Capability was controversial. The poet Richard Owen Cambridge said he hoped to die before Brown so he could see heaven before Brown had "improved" it. Gardeners tend to be judgmental sorts. Can't we all just agree that there's plenty of room to accommodate many tastes? To that end, GARDENISTA: The Definitive Guide to Stylish Outdoor Spaces (Artisan, $40), by Michele Slatalla with the editors of the website Gardenista, celebrates our eclectic nature. Slatalla is a garden dervish intent on taking us on a bracing romp through 13 of her favorites. You won't find any pretensions about contemplating the beauty of a crack in the wall: these well-loved spaces are also well lived-in. I especially admired the colorful English cottage beds of the interior designer Ben Pentreath and the restful evergreen Brooklyn backyard of the creative director Mariza Scotch and her husband, Dièry Prudent (a fitness trainer whose outdoor studio is tastefully tucked away at the back), to say nothing of Slatalla's own bountiful nest in Mill Valley, Calif. Slatalla is warm, approachable, lively - and chic. But she lets us in on everyone's secrets with sections labeled "Steal This Look," whether you're hankering for a French florist's bucket or the "ultimate chicken coop." She suggests ideas for paths, fire pits and foot showers; tips for drainage solutions; and a shopping directory that made me reach for my credit card. The Californians Sarah Lonsdale, a co-founder of the website Remodelista, and Louesa Roebuck, an artist and floral designer, share their adventures with foraged FLORA: A Year of Gathering and Arranging Wild Plants and Flowers (Ten Speed Press, $40). The "-ista" ladies (Slatalla and Lonsdale are colleagues) share a hip, confident, cheerful vibe, casual but studied. Amazingly, Lonsdale and Roebuck find all the flower-arranging beauty they need along local trails and roads, even on construction sites. The book opens with a stunning riff on fennel. Play with scale, they urge. Bring in the weeds, use unusual vessels, hang flowers from the rafters or lay them out on a long table or tack them to the edges of shelves. Whatever you do, enjoy their beauty and let your imagination loose. My favorite installation was at a tea business in Lagunitas, Calif., draped with wisteria, roses, apple blossoms and redbud - collected after two days of foraging. For the truly adventurous, there's also a recipe for Candied Rose Petals or Mint Leaves. When it comes to the big picture, not much is in our control. That's why we cherish small moments of beauty, whether found or made. The photographer Ngoc Minh Ngo celebrates people who make beauty their life's work with the gorgeous IN BLOOM: Creating and Living With Flowers (Rizzoli, $45). The textile and wallpaper designer Neisha Crosland covers the walls of her London house with chinoiserie-style flowers. The potter Frances Palmer imprints clay vessels with the vivid dahlias from her Connecticut garden. The horticulturalist Umberto Pasti celebrates Morocco's rich floral history in tile and fabric. The painter Claire Basler rings rooms with floral murals in her French chateau, while in the Bronx, Livia Cetti cuts, dyes, crimps and folds paper into exquisite flower arrangements. Each place is wondrous; for those not lucky enough to have friends around to enhance life with such magic, Ngo's enchanting photographs invite us in. Getting down to earth, let's end with the beginning: an egg. BABY BIRDS: An Artist Looks Into the Nest (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28), by Julie Zickefoose, is as fascinating and unusual as it is endearing. Zickefoose says there's "nothing like being a bird's mama to acquaint you with how it behaves, looks and thinks." For decades, she has been an "avian rehabilitator," complete with federal permits to handle migratory birds; she once rescued four tiny hummingbirds when their nests blew down. It seemed a natural step to begin drawing the transformation nestlings make as they speedily develop after hatching. Her process is painstaking, and breathtaking. A tiny, waxy, yellow-tinged creature rests on a bed of tissue under a warming lamp and is given "a steady supply of newly molted, tender mealworms." Zickefoose almost always draws from life, using only birds from boxes, chimneys or nests whose safety she can guarantee; it's a myth, she tells us, that eggs or baby birds touched by humans will be abandoned. What follows is a riveting diary of daily bird (and human) growth. Zickefoose tends 26 Eastern bluebird boxes at her house in Connecticut, and in a good year they will fledge close to a hundred young birds. Thankfully, given the perilous state of some of our songbirds, she isn't interested in "letting nature take its course." She rescues freezing birds, pulls obstacles from their throats, even makes new nests if old ones are overrun with parasites. I lost myself for hours in her adventures. Two hummingbirds she is painting are killed by jays on their 13th day. It seems miraculous that any of these wobbly-necked beings are ever able to soar, to become flickers of color across our meadows. You could say the same of baby humans. Nature can be messy and heartbreaking. That anyone can devote her life to studying it with such meticulous attentiveness should fill us with joy and hope. ? Dominique browning works for the Environmental Defense Fund as the senior director of Moms Clean Air Force.
Choice Review
This book is a loving tribute in text and magnificent photographs to the plant collecting passion of one woman--Ruth Bancroft. Over 40 years ago, Bancroft's garden started on three acres of decimated land previously used for ranching. At first, neither the plot of land nor the climate of Walnut Creek, CA, were welcoming to the many species of plants Bancroft collected. Overcoming formidable odds, Bancroft created a garden that is renowned for its breadth of grown species and horticultural experimentation. After a thorough introduction to Bancroft's life and a discussion of her interests, the main section of the book is devoted to descriptions and dramatic photographs of plant groups especially adapted to a dry climate. The Ruth Bancroft Garden, which was originally hand planted, has grown to impressive maturity. Bancroft's adventurous plant choices, attention to climate cues, and lack of fear of failure all provide an exquisite lesson to contemporary gardeners. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Leroy G. Kavaljian, California State University, Sacramento
Excerpts
Excerpts
Preface: My Journey to Ruth's Garden Before I started working on this book, I had never been to the Ruth Bancroft Garden. This was embarrassing for a garden editor at Sunset magazine to admit. Sure, I had heard of Ruth's garden. I knew it was a dry garden. I had seen photographs of the arching bed of tightly planted small succulents shielded by a shade structure and portraits of Ruth standing next to a patch of giant Agave franzosinii, but I had never visited. My first trip to this iconic garden was to be interviewed as a potential writer for this book. My first impression of the garden was that it was small (it is 3 acres under cultivation). I wondered if there was enough for an entire book, if I would get bored, and if there was enough to photograph. Despite my hesitation, I was grateful for the opportunity, eager to immerse myself in the topic of dry gardening in the face of California's worst-ever drought, and excited about the chance to work with photographer Marion Brenner. The year that followed was a crash course in Ruth's life, Ruth's plants, and Ruth's garden. It has been the ultimate humbling experience. The first thing I learned was that fancying us both "plant people" would not be enough to make me understand Ruth's drive. Ruth is a collector. I had no previous exposure to this subgroup, so I had to learn that more than just a love of plants motivates this population. Collectors have an insatiable need to possess knowledge, both intellectually and materially. Ruth's garden came from her desire to grow each and every plant that interested her (a list that never shrank) in order to learn each one fully. I quickly realized that while I might pass as succulent-literate to a beginner, Ruth's plant collection earns her extreme expert status, as her garden is a double black diamond of dry-adapted plants. Her "small" garden was too big and too full for me ever to fully grasp. Many months into the project, it struck me that Marion--no stranger to shooting gardens large or small, foreign or domestic, natural or formal--had not once tired of Ruth's garden. She gleefully packed up her camera, tripod, and scrims and toted them out to Walnut Creek every weekend. Her enthusiasm deepened my interest. Marion, often bored by plant close-ups, could not get enough of them in Ruth's garden. Individual species were endlessly fascinating: the spiny, ornate cactus are curiously enticing, and their flowers are disproportionately delicate and dainty--an awesome foil to those spines. Marion and I obsessed over subtlety we had never known, like the metallic sheen on new opuntia growth that we spent almost a full afternoon capturing. But Marion never tired of the vistas in the garden; I often had to holler at her to keep moving. Finally I acquiesced. Marion was right to linger, as the garden was always changing. The plants ebbed and flowed in their seasons of bloom and sleep. I expected year-round structure from cactus and succulents, but not the constant year-round change in growth and dormancy we encountered. We would arrive at the garden and try to walk around before setting up the camera, just to make sure we would not get so captivated by something near the entrance that we would never make it to the further reaches. Different things caught our eyes each time, from the tiniest ring of flowers that had developed along the crown of a cactus sitting at ground level to a freshly formed agave flower stalk that looked like a rocket about to propel into space. Ruth's garden boasts aloe plants in bloom from winter through summer, thanks to her longtime greenhouse manager, Brian Kemble, who has mastered a collection that is always giving. In spring, agaves swam amid a sea of orange- and yellow-flowered bulbine, but by early summer, ruby grass (Melinis nerviglumis) replaced the space between, adding movement and texture, with seed heads catching backlight. The light was another dynamic factor. The garden grows in a flat stretch of low-lying suburbia, unimpeded by tall buildings, and is awash in constantly changing light that plays perfectly with all the plants, from the statuesque to the ephemeral. The glow softens in the afternoons and evenings, backlighting structural plants, peeking through strappy leaves, and making spines look like radiant auras. One evening, when I was sure I had seen it all, the large, drooping melaleuca branches caught the sun in a way I had never noticed. Its beauty paralyzed me. We had trouble walking away as we lost the light, and Marion opened the camera's exposure for longer and longer to see if we could capture one last shot. Today I am no closer to being a plant collector than I was when I signed up to write this book. But a few things have changed. I will never again pretend to be literate with succulents (hearing someone loudly make that claim is your first indication to keep looking for a real expert). I am more lost than ever in a world of almost endless species, hybrids, and variations. But I am also fascinated by the details of plants, both as individual specimens and members of a diverse planting. I cannot resist peering into the leaves of an eye-level palm so I can witness the gentle geometry of its leaves making room for one another to unfold unimpeded by the one before. If a haworthia is in a small pot, I will likely pick it up to see if I can catch its leaves' surreal translucent glow. And with a love of Dyckia fully realized, I do not plant a succulent mix without its dreamy sharp, radial structure as part of the composition. I am now more likely to research where a plant comes from and track down photos of its natural habitat in order to get a sense of what helps it thrive in the garden. A love of plants is not what makes me feel connected to Ruth; rather, it is the practice of indulging my curiosity, as that is how she has spent her life. Intellectual as Ruth's love of plants might be, she retains a childlike curiosity. She is open to any plant type she finds appealing, from roses to cactus, and happy to talk with anyone, knowledgeable or not, about what they find appealing. You do not have to be an expert like Ruth to enjoy her garden. As long as you bring your curiosity, you are welcome inside her garden and into her world. I started this book just after Ruth's 106th birthday and wrapped it up right before she turned 107. I met with her on several occasions in her home and once in the garden. While her memory is understandably unreliable, she is very engaged with the world. She spends her days reading, listening to classical music and opera, and catching up on British dramas. When I first met her, I mentioned her recent birthday, and she swore there was no way she could have been 106. One sunny day we helped her into the garden because Brian was eager to show her recent updates. He gently oriented her to the history of a bed, updated her on the reasons behind particular choices, and asked for her approval. While they were staring at giant desert fan palms, he said, "You were planting the garden when you were in your sixties, and people said, 'It takes so long for these things to get big, you'll never live to see it.' But you did, and there they are. And they became magnificent." He reminded Ruth of her response: "You told them, 'Well, who cares if I'm around or not? Someone will be around. And if I don't plant it then nobody will get to see it.'" During my time with Ruth, her eyes lit up twice: once on the subject of weeding ("I always felt like I was doing just a little bit of good in the world"), and once at the mention of Brian, who started working for her in 1980. Brian found a home for his horticultural obsessions in Ruth's garden, and a lifelong friend in Ruth. I interviewed many people and practically memorized Ruth's oral history, but I relied most on Brian for hard-hitting plant information and for understanding Ruth's intentions. He is a most trustworthy guide into her world. I am honored to share Ruth's garden with you. And I hope you will find, like I did, that the longer you stare, the more there is to see. This is an opportune moment to reclaim our gardens as regionally appropriate spaces, and Ruth's is a treasure chest of inspiration, lessons learned, and beauty. Excerpted from The Bold Dry Garden: Lessons from the Ruth Bancroft Garden by The Ruth Bancroft Garden, Johanna Silver All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.